The Problem With Butterflies

It's funny how one song could make you miss a person so badly that you end up getting your phone and texting him.

It's funny how one song could stir so much emotion in you that you end up curling up in bed and looking at the window as your mind wanders into the deepest, darkest part of your soul where memories that you've tried hard to forget are stored.

It's funny how one song could make you question everything that has happened...make you second guess the decisions you have recently made...make you re-evaluate your life.

Is it really funny though? Is it really such a ridiculous idea or are you just trying to find humor in this tragedy to dilute its adverse effects?

You know the truth. You know that giving into the temptation of rekindling a love lost (even if it's only in your mind) is a masochistic act;

It's painful.

It's unforgivable.

It's morbid.

When you re-open that little box where you stored him and his memories, you lose all rational thought and self-control. You let yourself do things that you know won't benefit you in any kind of way.

You are perfectly aware of its repercussions and yet you still deliberately subject yourself to it. Your personal commandments of "you shouldn't-s" suddenly ticks itself with a glaring red ink of failure.

You know you shouldn't allow yourself to get sucked into this bottomless pit of what ifs and what could've beens for the second time around.

You know you shouldn't, at all costs, let those memories of warm sunny days and green luscious leaves, of bright smiles and stress-relieving conversations, bomb a hole into the heart that you've worked so hard on repairing.

You know you shouldn't let your heart skip a beat at the mere mention of his name, or the scent of his perfume, or worse, the sight of his face.

You know you shouldn't, but you still do.

You still feel the violent thumping in your heart, the chills down your spine, and the flutters of butterflies in your stomach.

And that's where the hardest dilemma comes in.

Those things should not be there anymore, and yet you still experience them in every molecule of your body.

There should not be any palpitations and irregular heart beats.

There should not be any current of electricity flowing through your veins.

There should not be butterflies.

Not anymore.

They should've been exterminated a long time ago together with the dreams and hopes that came with loving him.

They should've decayed with the papers filled with his words, elegantly brought to life by his stubby script.

They should've left the minute he walked out of your life.

They should've died.

They should've, and yet they didn't.

The problem with butterflies is that they never leave once they hatch and find solace in the depths of your being.

They act as constant reminders of what you thought you had, what you almost had, and what you never had.

They won't leave.They never will.

They will torture you till your dying breath.

They will make their presence felt whenever you see the spot where he left you, or when you pass by your usual table at the library.

The butterflies will throw away your desire for closure and instead replace it with a longing for a relapse.

And you, yes you. You will enjoy every bitter-sweet moment of it.

You will laugh and cry about the heartaches and the heartbreaks, but you will never give-up on him.

You'll let yourself lose a lifetime of sanity in exchange for even just two nights of bliss.

Because the problem with butterflies is you really don't want to get rid of it because at the back of your mind, you know it's never going to be just a casual set-up.

You can never, ever swallow the idea of you and him as just friends.

Spilled Ink

I want a tattoo.

I want ink to trace patterns on my skin.

I want to feel the needle pierce every inch of naked flesh that longs to feel excruciating pain until it becomes numb.

I want to be marked by art; be a blank canvas,an untouched block of marble,a clean slate that will be used as a medium to immortalize poetry and sketches.

I want to be filled with unconventional beauty. Something that not all people could understand and appreciate, but will cause someone's breath to hitch with it's perfection.

I want a tattoo not because I'm a rebel, a juvenile, or a villain, but because I am a wanderer, a believer of magic and immortality.

I am a girl who wants a tattoo.

I am an intelligent, perfectly rational and independent girl who wants something that is taboo.

Now tell me, am I crazy?

What You Need To Know About People Who Find Solace in Reading and Writing

                Thought Catalog has been my sanctuary for the past couple of months. I have spent countless hours browsing through its pages, reading articles and compositions written by complete strangers who for some reason, I find a connection with. It's a wonderful feeling to have someone who lives half-way across the globe empathize with you; to know that there's someone out there who has felt the way you've felt and can fully understand where you're coming from gives a sense of relief. 

But the best part of it is you don't even have to say anything after that. Sure, you can sob and do some wall-wailing after that heart-clenching read, but no one is obliging you to pat that person on the back and offer words of wisdom.

You get to be that person's person even if you don't know each other.

You allow him/her to just write out his/her thoughts while s/he allows you to dwell on his/her words.

This is actually a gift that not everyone appreciates because they fail to understand the beauty silence can make between two people. Not everyone understands that sometimes, not exchanging words at all and just being there weighs more than any inspirational words quoted from the most brilliant philosophers of the world.

It's quite hard really, to tell another person about the sentiments you have about everything and anything in your life. It's hard to speak your mind especially when you have critics lurking around you 24/7,

waiting to murder any seedling of thought that springs out from your mouth. It doesn't matter what type of relationship you have with your shrink, your siblings, or even your best friend. You can never truly open yourself up to anyone because you fear rejection and judgment.

Not everyone can practice the act of listening. Most people think that whenever you go to them to talk, they have the obligation to offer advice and to console you. But the truth is, you just want someone to hear you out. You just want someone to act as a vessel for your overflowing emotions because you can't keep it anymore.

But most people are natural talkers. They just love talking and acting like geniuses who have the solution to all your problems (if there are even problems to begin with). They act like they're all rational and logical, and they just make you feel like one big blob of uncontrolled emotions. 

This is why you feel threatened whenever another person offers to have a talk with you. Your inner voice screams at you to just pass on the opportunity to speak-out because you know nothing good will ever come out of it.

So you just stay silent.

You pretend like you're totally fine just to get everyone off your back.

You choose to keep it all in yourself even if you already feel like exploding on the inside.

It's normal.

I completely get you.

I think that it is natural for a person to choose to stay mum than to try and cultivate any idea of his through interaction with his fellow human beings. I, for one, just choose to read my curiosity away instead of asking other people. It's not because I'm anti-social or introverted (okay, somehow I am but only a tiny bit), or even proud, but because I'm afraid of being branded as 'stupid', 'uncultured', or 'naive'. I know it sounds really unfair and quite defensive of me to think that way, but I'm speaking through experiences I've had the last 18 years. 

People just like pouncing on the opportunity to degraded someone just to make themselves feel better in their own skin. They try to compensate for their short-comings by trampling on others' feelings.

Don't get me wrong. This is not some kind of anti-thesis about the saying "no man is an island", or the concept of mutualism and teamwork and sharing ideas or what have you. I am just trying to give an explanation why there are people like me who find solace in reading and writing, and why people shouldn't fault us for being this way.

We are not nerds, noobs, retards, depressed, lonely or conceited assholes. We're just people who are sick and tired of constantly feeling useless and irrelevant.

 So if you really want us to drop our books, stop writing in our journals and just talk, then you should start to learn how to listen.

She Knows How I Feel (thought catalog article)

Tell Me How To Stop Loving You

Ashley Sarel

     I was always conscious of how the fleeting moments we shared fit together like a story. Foreshadowing, symbols, motifs and metaphors wove together all too convincingly, forming the silhouette of what I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe we were meant for each other, that our love was preordained and my only role was to tread the pre-carved path to my destiny.

It was unusual how I’d dream of you one night and the next day you’d reach out to me after months of silence. It was as though my unconscious mind could sense ripples in the fabric of reality; the waves of anticipation would reach me before you did.

The story was rich with irony. So many nights were wasted dwelling on all of my shortcomings that prevented me from being with you. I should’ve focused on my work but I couldn’t. Irony resurfaced as you told me to think of a boy; surely my heart had been broken before? I laughed because if I hadn’t I would’ve cried and wouldn’t have been able to stop, the proximity of the truth was overwhelming.

I remember seizing moments to make cryptic comments about you ruining my life. I complained because ever since you told me your Converse rubbed your toes, my perfectly fitting shoes began to rub mine. ‘You’re ruining my life…’ I moaned as you laughed at my predicament. I hastily said was kidding because I immediately regretted the excess of truth I’d just poured into our conversation.

I remember the Freudian slips when you weren’t around. Your name fell through my fingers like electricity as I typed. Your name fell from my mouth even when you were the last thing on my mind.

I remember so much. I remember how I could feel the potential energy lurking in the pauses in our conversations. I remember the way I could only look you in the eye for the briefest of moments because I was scared you’d see through me if you looked long enough. I remember the time you called me smart and my inability to form words in response. I remember how I played the piano for you on an autumn day it felt like the start of something. I can remember how it felt to be seduced into giving up my former self by the spell of elated feelings you had me under.

It doesn’t matter how much I remember though, I don’t remember enough because you’re not here; not even in my memories anymore, not really. You’re slipping. I’m in love with a silhouette now because I can’t remember the exact shade of your eyes and I don’t remember what it sounds like when you laugh. You’ve become the blurry picture, the grains blown away by time, that we’d admired on the wall of an art gallery. I still love you but I don’t know who or what it is I’m in love with anymore. It’s all lost in a haze. I’m aimlessly searching, trying to fill the spaces you left.

Newton’s first law of motion states that ‘An object in motion stays in motion …unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.’ I’m stuck in the inertia of loving you. It’s been so long that I’ve forgotten who I was beforehand. I need a force to initiate movement in a new direction but I can’t find it within myself. I don’t know what more I can do. Time after time I’ve sought closure within myself but I still think of you whenever I shouldn’t and my brain only thrives off of my cries for silence.

I got too hung up on the idea of us being a story. The problem with stories is they demand an ending; a lesson, closure, solution, anything to justify the means. Without an ending it’s infuriating for the reader because the journey seems redundant, no matter how extraordinary it was.

How can I alone produce an ending that somehow justifies the intensity of everything I’ve felt and been for such a significant amount of time?

I need to move but I can’t, and I’m running out of time. I’m running out of myself. Guilt runs through my veins like ice when I listen to the music you like because I feel like I’ve stolen a part of you and kept it for myself. I hate myself a little more each time I check your profile just to remind myself you weren’t a dream. Time and time again I’ve tried to find a way to accept that I was only a whisper in your life when you were a symphony in mine.

Sometimes, the most obvious answers are the most difficult to find. The amount of ‘I’ in this story outweighs the amount of ‘you’. This love was never truly about you; your role in it was passive. My mind wove all the pieces together to form a beautiful story charged with possibility, passion and hope. The pieces were real enough, this wasn’t a work of fiction entirely. But the truths were woven into a lie. Lies can be beautiful, hideous or tragic and they can flourish in the absence of truth. But that’s the thing, truth will always obliterate the lie. Like light into darkness, the truth and the lie cannot coexist and the truth is going to win. I knew in my heart that we were a lie and it killed me every time I dared look.

I won’t let the shadows and lies, no matter how beautiful the patterns they’ve forged are, manipulate me anymore. I’ll stop counting the days since you said you’d talk later. I’ll stop checking your profile. I’ll stop trying to pinpoint the exact moment where I messed up my chances. These movements are small but I can feel my trajectory changing, subtly, I’m moving at a different angle now. Every moment that passes I’m further from how I was and I know that somehow, maybe not yet, I’m on my way to being okay. I might not be powerful, but it’s enough because the force came from within me. Not from you, not from anywhere else. I’m moving somewhere else now, of my own accord. I’m terrified but I’m not going back. 

The Original Article

Excerpts from Date A Girl Who Loves Solitude

Date A Girl Who Loves Solitude

The Truth About Us

I'm completely obsessed with the idea of explaining my personality to other people. I have long tried (and long failed) to concretize my abstract of a personality by using what I consider as the most sacred thing in the world: words.

I love words. I love letters. I love poetry and novels and other types of compositions. I love writing because it is what I do best. I love writing because I feel like every punctuation and letter acts as a window to my soul.

It usually just flows smoothly out of me, like spring water gushing down on a path on the mountain. But for some reason, I can't string the right sentences together when I start talking about me. It always seems so inadequate and sometimes, pretentious.

Then, I read an article on thought-catalog entitled "Date A Girl Who Loves Solitude" and I finally understood why I've never been triumphant with this challenge.

It doesn't matter how much of a word-smith you are, or how well you think you know yourself.

The right words would always come from a person who could observe you from afar; someone who would willingly spend a portion of their time to get to know you, and exert effort to understand what kind of person you are.

The little things that you do are the things that say most about you, and you will never be able to see or appreciate that the way another person could.

Maybe it was destined to be this way so we do not end up alone. It acts as a mechanism to draw two people towards each other, amidst the weirdness and imperfections we think we have.

You would never understand the beauty that radiates within you until you have someone to make you feel it.

No, it doesn't mean you're too dependent on others or that you don't love yourself enough to see these things on your own.

As people, it is normal for us to feel insecure and not trust our own beauty unless someone affirms it. No matter how loud our inner gods and goddesses scream how feisty,sexy,smart and irresistible we are, self-doubt will always win us over.

So don't feel bad if you're not as confident as you want to be. Don't feel bad if you secretly loath yourself. Don't feel bad for not being able to talk about yourself properly.

Sometimes, we need the help of other people to bring out the best in us and  to see ourselves in a new light.

Wondering Voices

Wondering is something that I do a lot.

I do it so often that it has married itself into my daily life, causing my brain to go on overdrive the minute I open my eyes. 

I think about what I might encounter if I get out of bed this morning, and what will be the consequences if I didn't. Would it be my last day to dream? Would I gain a new friend or lose one? Is this the day that I should try something that's completely out of my comfort zone, or should I just stay still and quiet on a corner to ensure my safety and live another day? Would I fly? Should I run or walk? Will someone grab my hand and dance with me on the street, or is this such an impossible feat?

These are the questions that haunt me every waking hour of the day. These are conversations that happen inside my head...conversations that excite and scare me at the same time. 

The voices in my head are my own and yet there are times when I don't recognize to whom does it belong.

There's an unknown force that pushes me to believe that the world is boundless, that abstract is beautiful and chaos is perfection.

But when I start to step foot on soft, uncharted soil, I get pulled back to the world bounded by black and white. There is no faith, no use for dreams, no beauty but only reality and science.

And I wonder...

I wonder who I really am.

I wonder if there's even a way for me to understand why I'm like this.

I wonder what would even happen if I do end up knowing myself.

Would I explode violently with my discovery, or would I finally love myself because of it?

I long to know the unknown but I'm too scared to go where there's no light, no safety rails, no familiar faces, no rules.

The Problem with Butterflies

Most people, if not all, long for only one thing: to love and be loved. Trust human beings to do all crazy stuff  just to feel the euphoria love brings…you know, that can't-eat, can't-sleep, reach-for-the-stars, over- the-fence, World Series kind of stuff  (It Takes Two, 1995).

But getting butterflies in your stomach isn’t always the ideal scenario. Sometimes it’s better to just be caught in the middle of a stampede than to feel all giddy and tingly inside especially when the person who’s causing you to feel such things is the same person you’re trying to get over from.

*This is usually the part where I start narrating my oh-so heartbreaking encounters the past two months and bombard myself with things I should’ve said and done during those moments where my rationality completely abandoned me, but heck. The reality of life is keeping me from exercising my right to free speech and self-determination (charot!) So what I’ll do with this entry is copy-paste articles that I have read over the weekend which really made my guts churn.

**If you want an article that would slap you awake, here you go.

How The People We Once Loved Become Strangers Again

FEB. 19, 2014
By BRIANNA WIEST

It’s interesting to think about how we make people who used to be everything into nothing again. How we learn to forget. How we force forgetting. What we put in place of them in the interim. The dynamics afterward always tell you more than what the relationship did — grief is a faster teacher than joy – but what does it mean when you cycle out to being strangers again? Because you never really stop knowing each other in that way. Maybe there’s no choice but to make them someone different in your mind, not the person who knew your daily anxieties and what you looked like naked and what made you cry and how much you loved them.

When our lives revolve around someone, they don’t just stop revolving around them even if all that’s left is the grief and pain that comes with their memory. Because you loved them, there will always be parts of them that linger. The memories that are impressed on the places you went and the things you said and the songs you listened to will remain. We all eventually find ourselves standing in the checkout line, hearing one of those songs come on and realizing that all of a sudden, we’re revolving around them again. And maybe we never stopped.

Do you ever really forget your lovers’ birthdays, or all your first times, intimate and not? Do your anniversaries ever become normal days of the year again? Are the things you did and promises you made ever really neutralized? Do they become void now that you’re broken up or do you decidedly ignore them because there’s simply no other choice? The mind tells you to go on, and forces your heart to follow suit I guess.

Related Thought

Can We Choose Who We Love?

The kind of love that centuries of books and plays and stories have regaled us with are the ones in which all expectations are defied in place of love anyway.


I want to believe that you either love someone, in some way, forever, or you never really loved them at all. That once two reactive chemicals cross both are changed. That the wounds we leave in people are sometimes too raw to risk falling back into them. I don’t want to believe that we write each other off because we simply don’t matter anymore. I know love isn’t expendable. I wonder, and maybe hope, if we ever just force it to be out of that necessity.


Maybe it’s just that we’re all at the centers of our own little universes, and sometimes they overlap with other people’s, and that small bit of intersection leaves some part of it changed; that’s where we grow together. The collision can wreck us, change us, shift us; sometimes we become eternally undetachable and connected and other times we decidedly move away because the change required to accept another person’s universe colliding with yours is a safety we don’t want to leave. Either way, it’s inevitable that your universe expands. That you’re left knowing that much more about love and what it can do, and the pain that only a hole in your heart can bring. Whether or not that hole will ever again include the person who made it that way, that’s for you to decide.


We all start as strangers. The choices we make in terms of love are usually ones that seem inevitable anyway. We find people irrationally compelling. We find souls made of the same stuff ours are. We find classmates and partners and neighbors and family friends and cousins and sisters and our lives intersect in a way that makes them feel like they couldn’t have ever been separate. And this is lovely. But the ease and access isn’t what we crave. It isn’t what I’m writing about right now. It isn’t what we revolve around after it’s gone. We are all just waiting for another universe to collide with ours, to change what we can’t ourselves. To fill us, to make us whole. It’s interesting how afterwards, we realize that the storm returns to calm, but the stars are always changed and we don’t choose whose collisions change us. We all start as strangers, but we often forget that we choose who ends up a stranger too.

***If you want an article to tell you that it’s okay to let go, read this

 

Getting Over The One You Thought Was The One: When It’s The Right Time To Move On

SEX • EMILY RELLA • FEB 25, 2014 - 9:15AM


Oftentimes — most of the time, actually — there is no bright light or shining, definitive moment that signifies the end of a relationship. People drift apart, things change and we can’t keep in touch with every person through every stage of our lives. But, this ambiguity can make it difficult to decide when enough is enough, and when it’s really time to let go.

I try to teach myself never to give up on anyone, no matter how difficult things may be. But, there’s a difference between giving up on someone and knowing when you have more than you can handle. More importantly, no matter how much you don’t want to admit it, it’s important to know when you have less than you deserve. But, coming to this revelation isn’t easy.

For so long, I convinced myself that the way I was being treated (or in better terms, the way I was being ignored) was just something I had to learn to deal with. I tried to make myself believe that it was okay, because in different ways, we were both wrong. I convinced myself that if I reached out and was made to feel like a fool, I just had to learn to accept that — but I didn’t accept it. I didn’t deserve 10 months of silence, I didn’t deserve to be ignored and I didn’t deserve to be mocked. What I deserved was a conversation — a sober one at that.  I deserved a response to the messages I sent and to every effort I made.

Silence is worse than any argument and it screams much louder than any harsh word or accusation. It leaves you with unanswered questions and a constant sense of anxiety and false interpretations. For almost a year, I wished for a break to the silence. One word would have been enough; I wasn’t expecting some grand gesture, or even much at all. I just hoped for something, but got nothing. And that’s not so much sad as it is eye-opening as to who you really are. You can’t expect time to take control of everything and fix what’s been broken without making any concerted effort. Sometimes, time doesn’t heal — it just rips people further apart.

At some point, we come to a crossroads in these relationships when we realize that the person we once knew is no longer the person who stands before us. It’s not necessarily that he or she made some sort of grand, internal transformation, though sometimes, that may be the case. Sometimes, we simply see a difference from what we thought we knew and it becomes nearly impossible to remember who the person (we thought we knew) was before.

I got to a point where I realized that no matter what grandeur and good the future may have held for us, it could never take back the cowardice and apathy that I had seen before. I would never be able to erase that; I could forgive but not forget, and in not being able to forget, I would always see a different person.

All of the things I loved about you had been saturated by this awful darkness and they would be forever tainted; it had come to a point where the bad simply outweighed the good and the memory of the good wasn’t enough to sustain in the present anymore.  I had loved you, but I didn’t like you anymore.

Everyone messes up; we are taught to forgive, and as difficult as that can be, we really ought to try. But, I realized that even if I forgave you, you didn’t want to be forgiven. You were indifferent. Even if I chose to come to you and tell you that it was okay and that we could fix it and rebuild, it would have made no difference to you.

You can’t fight for someone who doesn’t want to fight back and you can’t grant forgiveness to someone who doesn’t care about being forgiven; it’s like throwing a tennis ball against a wall and expecting it to stick and not bounce back. Sometimes, letting go of someone means putting an end to a one-sided fight. And when you can recognize it as that, everything becomes much easier.

Letting go doesn’t mean that all of the good goes away. I know that you’re not a bad person; in fact, I still think you’re wonderful. I know that your heart — though you often keep it tucked away and silenced — is big and capable of almost anything for those who you care about. And, of course, I miss you. Letting go of you doesn’t take any of that away.

I’ll admit that there are still parts of me that believe that this story has been left unfinished. There are pages I’ll never be able to read and new chapters that I’ll never get to experience. Part of me still believes that these pages exist somewhere, floating around in the corners of some universe. We just weren’t able to find them and we’re never going to find them because this book has closed — and I’m the one who’s closing it.

 
Note: Before I shut down my laptop and get some rest, I want to leave a message to two people who are very dear to my heart.
CVB, fuck you and your indecisiveness. If you fucking like me, don’t tell me then leave me behind afterwards. That’s just plain stupid! And if you really want to be friends again, stop being such a douchebag. Ugh. You frustrate the hell out of me.
MAPG, one big GO TO HELL for you. You’re like the king of all assholes. Yes you have a girlfriend now and yes, I do understand that you love her a lot and you like spending time with her. But can you please please please stop rubbing it in my face!? It’s getting pretty irritating. Try to be more sensitive to my feelings. We’re friends right? I think I already made it pretty clear how I feel about her…about the fact that you were able to give her something that I fought so hard for when we were still ‘together’: commitment. So please, let me keep the little self-respect that I still have.

Sources:
http://thoughtcatalog.com/brianna-wiest/2014/02/how-the-people-we-once-loved-become-strangers-again/#vicfVJcTiDIBu83e.01
http://elitedaily.com/dating/sex/getting-over-the-one-you-thought-was-the-one-when-its-the-right-time-to-move-on/

Contemplation of a nocturnal

My life isn't perfect.

I'm independent for a reason. 

I was forced to act, think and talk maturely at a very young age. The privilege of gradual development wasn't granted unto me. I had to skip all the 'childhood' parts of my life. I was made to believe that time well spent is time used in reading a book or watching the news. Friends are foes in disguise. Telly was just a distraction that did nothing but limit my intellectual capacity. Though I was able to enjoy the glories of Disney, I was never ever able to truly capture the essence of it. Fairies, pixie dusts and genies were to be treated as mere creatures who condoned sloth and indecisiveness; with a flick of a wand they can give you your heart's desire or transform it into something else without you doing anything. 

I was expected to know how to run my life and run it well.

Dreaming was never an option.

Everything was to be planned because if at the first try you don't succeed then you are reduced to mere a failure. There's no second chances. There's no pep talk and pats in the back.

Achievements were to be treated only as another step conquered to reach a higher goal. 

I was never allowed to sit back, relax and think of what I want to do next. It was always one work after another, one medal or two to be added to the myriad of shiny golden things that hung on the wall, new plaques to be displayed on top of the staircase, and another trophy for them to brag about.

Yes, I feel like I'm just a trophy child.

I feel empty.

I feel ruined.

And everything was aggravated by the fact that I'm the eldest child.

A whole new burden has been brought to my shoulders; one that deepened the already hallowed part of my being.

Don't get me wrong. I love my siblings with all my heart but sometimes, I can't help wondering why everything has to be this way. Most of the time I want to throw all that I have and all that I am and go to a new place for a new beginning.

But there's nothing that I can do to walk away from all of this. And so, I just decided to do what I do best; put my feelings in words and give a whimsical twist to it.

You're forced to limit your needs and eliminate any wants in life.
You cannot simply ask your parents for money even if it's for school purposes because as the 'practical one', you're expected to save your allowance (no matter how small it is) and use it for buying stuff you need.
You cannot choose a college program that exceeds the 4 yr norm, and it should only involve digits because it pays to be good in Math.
You should be contented with hand-me-downs from your grandmom/mom/cousin/aunt. As long as it fits, you wear it. (underwear included)

Your siblings "look-up" to you. Every bad action/thing they make automatically reflects to you. So if they're screwed, you get the blame.

This pretty much sums up everything.

When your mom has problems with your dad or with the household, she goes to you because your father's too manly  for this and your siblings are too young.
When one of your siblings has problems at school, with their friends or with their lovelife, they immediately go to you. Either they ask you to give advice or just sit there and absorb their depression.

The kind of life you're living right now is probably the product of Good Parenting advice,books and articles.

You cannot let your emotions supersede your logic.
You're not allowed to express any kind of teenage hormonal crap coz your parents won't tolerate it.

Well, you can but it will only get in the way of your education and doing the household chores. Speaking of chores, you are expected to voluntarily  assume responsibility over your house when no one is available.